


bright star

by fab_ia



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alcohol, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, John Keats - Freeform, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Power Imbalance, Violence, kepler is a deeply fucked up asshole of an individual, this time its 10 times more unhealthy and 2 times as long babey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-10
Updated: 2019-10-10
Packaged: 2020-11-28 18:22:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20970986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fab_ia/pseuds/fab_ia
Summary: “have you ever felt quite so alive?”good question, you think to yourself. damn good question.(a rewrite of one of my older works)





	bright star

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [bright star (would i were steadfast as thou art)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12333798) by [fab_ia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fab_ia/pseuds/fab_ia). 

“have you ever felt quite so alive?”

the words spill from your mouth almost as though it were a fountain, the cold steel of a loaded gun pressing into the joint where shoulder meets chest meets throat and all that added together makes a place where the heavy chill brings a chill under the skin when there’s a weapon there and you shudder at it, just barely enough to be noticed. and your words, oh, your words are the ones that lead into the praises you sing to your God, warren, even though you haven’t been religious for the last twenty-odd years and you can hardly see the point in pretending now that you’ve been devout, that you’ve ever been a perfect disciple, and you swallow -

  
  


** _bright star, would i were steadfast as thou art-_ **

  
  


you can feel your grin stretching your cheeks as your finger tightens around the trigger and you let the bullet go, but you don’t hear the shot, ‘cause your ears are filled with the sound of jacobi laughing just off to your left as he wrestles a knife from the hand of one of those idiots that followed you out to the clearing, fingers cut on the blade and wet with the blood that spills over them even as he yanks it from their grip and flicks it into his own. your eyes fix on the bright, garish stain on the crisp white, the crumpled form collapsed in a slowly-spreading pool of crimson against the snow, and you can’t look away - there’s a sort of morbid beauty in it, really, something glorious that you relish in. jacobi laughs - he keeps laughing and laughing and laughing, proving to the both of you that he’s every bit the monster you’ve been making him into with the simple fact that he’s enjoying the danger, how it brings the adrenaline up to run through his veins while blood trickles from various cuts and scrapes and purple bruises form in a beautiful rosette on his cheek.

this destruction, this carnage - oh, you revel in it, you  _ relish _ it, sometimes it’s the only thing that can make you feel like your life’s worth living. with a single nod, jacobi stands beside you from his crouch, a second body curled on the ground beside your feet, with a twin expression of horror to the first that will stay there until the rot inevitably sets in. you close your eyes, look away from the scarlet-stained snow, and hear more voices, more footsteps. you lick your lips as you cock your gun again and look over at him.

“ _ have _ you?” you ask, pressing him for an answer he doesn’t need to dwell on before he gives, shaking his head as he reaches for his own pistol where it’s holstered at his side, spitting out a little blood as he rolls his shoulders, low  _ crack _ audible even through his jacket.

“god,” he says, “no. never. this is seriously your day job?”

“well,” you say, grinning again as the two of you face the cavalry, “actually, mr jacobi, i think you’ll find it’s  _ ours _ .”

  
  


** _not in lone splendour hung aloft the night-_ **

  
  


in some way you can’t quite manage to put your finger on, maxwell completes the two of you, makes the perfect unholy trinity - not, of course, that you’ve got even the faintest clue which of you should take up which position. the doubt presses on you, the question hanging like a weight in your mind and keeping you up late into the night, especially when you’re on missions with the two of them. hotel rooms are never silent, filled with keyboard clicks and the hiss of a soldering iron, the two of them talking quietly while they work and you work on your own, occasionally glancing up to see what they’re doing. maxwell, focus solely on her laptop as she works on code and surveys the security feed - doing exactly as she’s told, building up her virus to eat away at their defences and shields before the three of you infiltrate it on cutter’s orders. you watch her for a little while, how her fingers fly over her keys, and you wonder what she’s doing - you’d ask, but you’d have no idea what she was saying, you’ve got just enough knowledge of computers to get by, but not enough to get through a job like hers.

she may well be the least personable of the three of you - although, well, you can’t really say that you’re  _ brilliant _ with people, but you’ve spent long enough watching them that you can fake it just fine - but her razor-sharp with and her double-edged tongue of silver and nearly mechanical fingers can open doors and find things that no soft voice, charm, or lazy drawl could ever dream of achieving.

out of the three of you, you’d say jacobi may well be the luckiest - he can pass as ‘normal’ better than either you or maxwell can. but the word ‘normal’, oh, you hate that word  _ so  _ much. what does it mean, really? doesn’t everyone have their own definition of it? still, you need to find a word to describe how you all have to act, and maybe ‘human’ is closer to it. jacobi passes as human better than you and maxwell do, and he has to put a hell of a lot less effort into it. sure, yeah, you can put on that charm, wear a smile as a mask and pull the wool over a stranger’s eyes with a gentle voice, but it doesn’t mean that people can’t tell it’s an act. it doesn’t mean that they can’t tell there’s something wrong, something  _ off _ about you, something that even years upon years of acting classes could ever fix. as for maxwell - well, she can act just fine, but if they look her in the eyes they’ll see that shine in them, something calculating. something you think you could maybe call clinical, analytical.  _ robotic _ . 

oh, you think she’d like that description a  _ lot _ .

sometimes - not often, but sometimes - she mentions some desire deep in her, the want to be something  _ other _ , more than human, flesh and metal and electricity crackling through her veins. she doesn’t want to be a monster like you and jacobi already are, nothing like you and your golden boy, doesn’t want her soul to be twisted into shadow - all teeth and claws with blood staining its hands, more viscera than should ever be seen by anyone except a surgeon in their whole lifetime. no, she doesn’t want to be simple flesh like you and jacobi, she wants to move far past that, wants to be the one to reach that point, the breakthrough that lets a consciousness become ones and zeros and strings of numbers, leaving the fragility of the human form behind, in the dust. she wants to play god, play creator, wants to make life take a different path.

even so, in her plain and painfully human life, she’s the one that understands you and your bullshit metaphors the best, far better than jacobi could - you doubt he’s ever even opened a copy of the bible, let alone read it, but maxwell’s father was a religious nut, forced her to commit plenty of it to memory as a kid. she hasn’t been to church since she went to college, and you can’t fault her one bit for that, but there’s enough of it in her subconscious that she, without fail, even after all these years, gives you a knowing look whenever you reference it.

  
  


** _and watching, with eternal lids apart-_ **

  
  


“mister,” the little girl breathes, clutching a teddy loosely in one hand and staring at you with wide and fearful eyes, “a-are you a monster?”

you must look like one, you realise, standing in the hallway of a house you’ve broken into after killing the owners three miles away, jumpsuit saturated with blood and a visor covering your face that’s cracked over the left eye. your earpiece crackles as you stare at her, turning the question over in your mind. there’s a different kind of weight to it than usual, a different weight to when either maxwell or jacobi asks how monstrous the three of you are getting.

“perhaps,” you reply, voice just barely a whisper. she looks even more scared of you now and you feel bad, you  _ pity _ her, but you aren’t about to lie to a child. you know better than most that lying to a kid’s going to ruin them, going to leave them scarred and fucked up to hell and beyond when they grow up. look at all of you, look at each one of you. look at jacobi, how he desperately strives for praise, fights to be your best, your right hand, after years upon years left alone with only himself for both company and entertainment. unless, of course, his father took it upon himself to care for once, after too many cans of shitty beer and a spark of a temper that jacobi could spark into a roaring flame easily, just by being himself.

hell, look at maxwell, the way she grimaces and curls in a little more on herself when you pass a church either on foot or in a car; the way she pulls a mask of neutrality over her expression whenever someone calls her ‘pretty, calls her ‘miss’, and by  _ god _ does she make you wonder, sometimes. it’s easy enough to get jacobi to talk to you and spill his own stories - all you have to do is get him a drink, tell him how good he is, rest your hand on his shoulder - but maxwell’s harder, and you aren’t going to push her boundaries, you’re not going to press her and lose what trust she’s put in you. still, though, you can’t help wondering what the hell her family did, what the people she went to  _ school _ with did, to fuck with her, leave her with those invisible scars.

“are you gonna eat me all up?” the little girl asks, bringing you back to the present with a trembling voice. you stare at her and you keep wondering -  _ what if i did _ ?

“no.”

“mister?!”

“no,” you repeat, your voice dropping, getting softer. you shift one hand to the handle of your gun, coated with the sticky scarlet that’s seeped into the fabric of your clothes, leaving them tacky against your skin. “no, i’m not going to hurt you.”

you turn away, get ready to leave, and you screw your face up. god, you don’t like kids. you never did, not even when you  _ were _ one.

  
  


** _like nature’s patient, sleepless eremite-_ **

  
  


maxwell yawns and leans back in her seat, cracking her fingers, bored of her latest coding book as she looks over at you. “what were you like as a little kid, sir?”

jacobi looks up too, pushing up his glasses after they’ve fallen halfway down his nose, his book falling shut in his lap - a quick glance at the cover says it’s history, surprisingly. you’d expected it to be chemistry, or science, or something. he nods slowly, frowning. “yeah,” he says, “ _ yeah _ . why’ve you never told us anything about your childhood, sir? you know all about mine, and you’ve probably read ‘lana’s file to find out about hers…”

you glance up at them for a moment before looking back down, shrugging. you wonder - is this the time? is this your time to tell them the truth about how you grew up, or should you spin your web of lies, deep at the heart of yourself, wary to share anything in case your tongue slips and you tell them too much, tell them everything about you and your life? do you say something, or keep yourself safe behind your walls like you always have done?

“huh,” you say, “what was  _ i _ like?”

they both roll their eyes at you, grinning at each other as the cadence in your voice shifts and changes, moving into what you’ve heard them call ‘storytime mode’ pretty often, and your mouth slips up into a grin. “ _ well _ ,” you say, rolling your shoulders back. “i know my neighbours used to talk, say i was strange, tell my parents there was always something off about me. imagine that - me, strange,  _ unsettling _ , even. mrs jones from down the road, she used to use that one a lot, i remember my parents saying.”

the end table is cluttered, a half-empty bottle of whiskey among the books and paper and you reach out for it, fumbling with the cap and only barely managing to catch it before you take a swig from it, closing your eyes with a shudder as the burn - the oh-so familiar burn - reaches you, warming your throat and chest.

“y’know what, sir?” jacobi grins at you pushing his glasses back up his nose again, “i can kinda see why they called you a weirdo.”

you laugh - you don’t know what other choice you have except to laugh, because you see it too, you know exactly why, but you’re never going to tell them and it’s hilarious. the only two people that you could probably trust with your story, your history, and you still won’t tell them, even though you know that the two of them are both just as fucked up as you are.

  
  


** _the moving waters at their priestlike task-_ **

  
  


sometimes, for some reason, people ask jacobi if the two of you are -  _ you know,  _ together? 

it wouldn’t be so much of an issue if it didn’t happen so often, if it wasn’t so fucking  _ funny _ . when you overhear it, you always fight not to openly laugh in their faces, because the idea of you keeping up a healthy relationship in  _ your _ job is absolutely preposterous - when you look over at jacobi, his face is always screwed-up and twisted in an expression halfway between confusion and something approaching amusement.

“define ‘together’,” he says. “do you mean ‘would probably kill me in a heartbeat if i was a liability and would definitely leave me for dead if it was a burden to take me home after an injury’? because if you do, yes. we’re very much together, and very happy about it, too.”

that’s never what they mean, though, they’re always trying to ask whether he loves you, and all you can say to  _ that _ is that you really, really, hope that he doesn’t. for his own good, as well as yours.

still though, one night after he’s asked that question you end up finding yourself in bed with him, having kissed him everywhere you could reach and brought him to the edge with your name on his lips before you kissed that away too. it’s dark, room lit only by the lamp on your bedside table, warm glow making his features look softer than they really are. his head on your chest, he makes a content sound as he flicks through something on his phone, likely something you’ll only understand a few sentences of. idly, you run a hand through his hair, letting it slip through your fingers as though it’s the most natural thing in the world for the two of you.

“this isn’t love, is it?” he asks, not even bothering to look up at you and only making an irritated noise when you stop playing with his hair. “i mean, it can’t be love. half the time i don’t even like you, y’know? you’re just… you’re sort of… god, i don’t know? you’re just…  _ you _ .”

“high praise,” you say, impressed at how you’ve managed to keep your voice from sounding a little strangled. “i’m flattered, jacobi.”

“oh, shut your mouth.”

you snort, before letting out a sigh as he shifts so that he’s resting on his knees between your legs, facing you with a grin on his face. he runs a hand up the outside of your thigh, leaning in a little bit so you  _ can’t _ ignore the fact his lips are still rose-red and his hair’s still wild where you haven’t yet smoothed it down. you run your eyes down his body, appraising him for a moment before you sigh again, leaning back against the headboard. “you’re insatiable.”

“maybe so,” he sniggers, leaning in to catch your lips with a kiss that you chase, pulling him close to you and running your hands down his back, feeling the muscles beneath the skin, scars and freckles marking it and making him so unique -

it’s still not love, though.

it isn’t, and it never will be because neither of you are stupid enough to think that what you have is a healthy, functional,  _ human _ relationship, because monsters can’t love. since that’s what you both are - wild, untameable monsters - you don’t hold any love in your hearts either, and it means absolutely jack-fucking-shit that you sleep together. even monsters need a little stress relief, after all.

  
  


** _of pure ablution round earth’s human shores-_ **

  
  


earth is the planet both of and for humanity, which might explain why maxwell and jacobi both seem so thrilled at the concept of being able to leave it, strapped into their seats in the urania with wide grins and hushed talks in voices laced with anticipation as you run over the last of the pre-flight checks, cutter’s tinny, obnoxiously cheerful voice through the speakers a choice reminder of exactly what you  _ won’t  _ miss while you’re up in space. glancing back, you see the anticipation has spread, filled your two best with nervous and pent-up energy - maxwell bouncing her leg and tugging idly at her buckle while gazing around; jacobi fidgeting with the zipper on the leg of his jumpsuit. you can’t blame them, can’t fault them for it, not when you know you’d be in much the same position if not for the simple fact that you’ve kept yourself busy by doing things you could just as easily have an automated system do.

soon, though, outside the windows of the urania there’s nothing but blackness; a velvet blanket of space draped over the three of you as you speed through the void. you float, idly, by one of the windows, a hand on the railing as you stare out into nothingness. it feels like home, or at least more like it than chicago ever did. and here, at least, there’s no rules as to what you can and can’t do - this is the real no man’s land, fuck whatever you saw in afghanistan, space is the real warzone. there’s only a few ways to solve a conflict diplomatically in space and when those run out, the solution is a loaded gun to the temple and a countdown before you pull the trigger. the sound of victory in space is the echo of a gunshot in a clinically clean room, louder than you’ve ever heard one before.

it’s exhilarating, to put it simply.

“you really reckon they’re alive out there?” jacobi asks. not maxwell, never maxwell, she doesn’t give a damn about the crew, caring only for whatever state the mother program’s in. whether or not there’s some way she can help her (it), if she’s ( _ it’s _ ) not already too far beyond her reach.

“shit, jacobi,” you say, letting it ring out for a second before you continue, “who even  _ knows _ ?”

you don’t know for definite, but you’ve got a feeling they might be. there’s plenty else you know about the mission, though, not that you’ve planned to share most of it with either of them. cutter’s orders, after all, dictate that you shouldn’t be sharing the confidential, ‘need to know’ information with anyone, let alone the only two people left that you trust wholeheartedly. 

if maxwell had chimed in, if she’d cared enough about your conversation to join in, you might have made a joke about cutter being like a god, sending angels to make his judgements either, even if you know she’d have brushed it off with a laugh and a comment about how gods are meant to be  _ merciful _ and  _ loving _ . mentioned how gods are meant to create, and maybe you could have even joined in again with a comment about how ‘god giveth and god taketh away’, because creation, mercy, even love, they aren’t the only important things in the world.

there’s destruction, after all, and chaos. in some ways, there is justice, or perhaps maybe injustice, but either way, it’s there. the scales of fate, the scales of final judgement. 

  
  


** _or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask-_ **

  
  


lovelace - isabel sofia, your mind helpfully supplies, a memory from all those years ago, the  _ first _ hephaestus mission - died years ago, falling into the star in a hashed-together shuttle that by all rights shouldn’t have even made it into space. jacobi would call it poetic, probably, might even ask you to toss his own body into the sun when he dies. she’s alive, though, and staring at you with her eyes narrowed in a glare and an acidic venom in her look, lit from behind with a fiery anger. she can tell, you fancy, that she can tell you know things she doesn’t, and she doesn’t like that fact one bit. it’s not her fault, though, not when you’ve had your whole life to learn the rules to the game you’re playing, and she’s had a few months at most. you won’t let her best you, and so you challenge her to a game of chess.

you’re going to win, of course, just like you always do.

  
  


** _of snow upon the mountains and the moors-_ **

  
  


jacobi’s silence is never a good sign. it’s something you hate, and your silent question receives only a shake of the head from him, which leaves a sinking feeling in your stomach, and you nearly expect someone to be carrying a body off of their little research module. instead, though, you’re met with three more, equally silent, subordinates, and you narrow your eyes at the lot of them and wonder what the hell happened.

“what happened,” you say. it’s not a question, and they all know it. eiffel won’t meet your eyes, and maxwell leans a little closer to jacobi, whose posture is stiff and straight and unusually  _ perfect _ . you turn your gaze to lovelace, who looks back at you with steely determination.

“sir,” she starts, before frowning a little. “there was - well. there was an incident.”

“tell me everything,” you say, and she does. maxwell and eiffel chip in a few times, but jacobi doesn’t say a word, and he won’t look at anyone at all. you listen to the explanation in silence, before nodding and dismissing everyone except jacobi, whose mouth twitches into a scowl for a half-second before it falls back to neutrality.

alone with him, you circle him once, noting the way he stiffens when you’re entirely behind him, totally out of his line of vision. it’s not new, it’s a learned behaviour from childhood - you think - but you always make note of it. making your way to his front again, you use two fingers to tilt his head up, resting just beneath his chin. his breath is hot against the parts of your hand it hits, and you take in every little detail of his face as you have so many times before. he has long eyelashes, you always notice, long and dark and so nice against his skin.

you don’t say anything at all when you slam him into the wall, but he lets out a cry, twisting in pain as you tug him away by his hair, twisting your grip in it as he whimpers and claws at your arm, trying to wrench himself free before you slam him into the wall again, listening to his already-laboured breathing. he’s looking at you now, eyes wide, and you push him into the wall again, face-first this time, pressing his head down until you hear another badly-muffled cry and you shove him once more for good measure before you back off, eyes raking his form once more.

“are you the real daniel jacobi?” you ask, voice only a little bit strained, as though you’ve been out for a jog instead of shoving him into cold metal. “don’t lie when you answer me.”

“yes, sir,” he breathes, voice shaking with both pain and anger. maybe even a little bit fear, you think idly as you look at his face, the split lip you’d managed to cause at some point without realising. he looks fucking exhausted, though, dark circles under his eyes that make it look like he hasn’t slept in days. maybe he hasn’t “it’s me, sir. i’m real. i’m the real jacobi.”

“how sure are you?” you ask, raising your eyebrows when his eyes widen in what is  _ definitely _ fear when he remembers the knife you keep on you. “there really is a simple test, you know, and i’ve been  _ dying _ to get some frustration out-”

he swallows, licks his lips and smears the droplet of blood that had been threatening to fall across them, and gives you a wary look. calculating. he’s weighing something up.

“i’m sure there’s a better way,” he says, slowly, watching how you react to that. you smirk, cross your arms across your chest and nod for him to go on. “i mean… we’ve both been so  _ stressed _ , recently, and i’m sure you’d appreciate the opportunity to check that there isn’t anything different below my clothes…”

“sly,” you comment, and let him lean in for a kiss that tastes of metal and coffee, his legs wrapping around your waist as he cups your face and tangles his fingers in your hair, just starting to grow out. you let out a groan against his lips and think about his scars, half-moons on his chest and a littering of them on his thighs and stomach, the moles and freckles littering his body, and you’re going to look for every single one.

  
  


** _no - yet still stedfast, still unchangeable-_ **

  
  


your personal items from the urania aren’t exciting, not really, just a selection of books you grabbed at random from your bookshelf. you’ve read all of them at least twice before, but it’s still a nice way to unwind after a long rotation, or when sleep just isn’t coming. you look up at the camera in your quarters and hum. “hera, have you ever heard of these?”

“heard of them, yes,” she says. “lieutenant minkowski tells me about literature a lot, and sometimes the captain does too. as for officer eiffel -”

“i know,” you chuckle. “do you have any opinions on poetry? i’ve got a nice book of some good ones with me.”

“i don’t have any, no,” she says, almost regretful. “do you like poetry, colonel?”

you think, for a second, and nod. “it’s just storytelling,” you say, “except at the same time, it isn’t. someone’s already done it for you, but if you just take it at face value, you never see the bigger picture, never see what’s below the surface. you never really see what the  _ point _ of it all is, see?”

“i do,” she says. you smile when you go back to your book, turning a page without reading anything. you wonder when exactly you stopped thinking of her as wholly machine and at least partly sentient, and eventually shrug it off as a simple result of spending too much time with her and maxwell, of them rubbing off on you. still, it’s a little amusing to you, how easy it is to talk to the members of the hephaestus crew that aren’t really human at all. 

  
  


** _pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast-_ **

  
  


“lieutenant minkowski,” you say, turning your gun over in your hand and running your fingers over the raised parts, wondering idly how you let it get to this point, “i’m going to shoot captain lovelace in the head.”

you know, of course, that the woman isn’t the real captain lovelace - a cheap knockoff, thanks to the aliens that eiffel’s started calling the ‘dear listeners’. you know for a fact that you told the truth when you told hilbert she’d burned up in the star. she died years before you met her, and she’ll be back within a few days, tops. looking her in the eyes, though, you don’t see any sudden pre-death revelations, you just see fear in the eyes of a woman who’s been trying to hide it with wit and defiance, taunts and jabs. it’s almost a shame you have to be the one to do it, in the end. you’re not certain red’s your colour.

you raise the gun. you steel yourself.

there is no diplomacy in no man’s land.

you pull the trigger and the sudden silence after the noise of the shot is louder than you realised it would be, with eiffel staring at you in horror.

“you have thirty minutes to think about what you’ve done,” you tell minkowski, and turn back to the mess in front of you.

shooting someone in zero gravity is messier than you thought it would be.

  
  


** _to feel for ever its soft fall and swell-_ **

  
  


lovelace - the alien - comes back with gasping breaths, a horrible sound in the silence that falls at the first movement from the body bag. gagging and choking, chest heaving, venom on its lips as it slowly fights its way back to life. minkowski stares, eyes wide in horror, and jacobi shoots what he obviously thinks is a subtle glance over at maxwell’s body, unmoving and cold. you stare up at the ceiling. 

“that was nowhere near as long as i thought it would take,” you say. you hear your voice, and it’s calm, as though you were commenting on the chance of rain later in the day. minkowski snarls, turns the gun on you, presses the barrel against your forehead and makes you look at her - you do. you wonder how maxwell would feel about that being the last thing she ever saw.

“what did you do to her?” minkowski demands. her hand’s shaking, just like maxwell said. it didn’t stop her in the end, though, did it? didn’t stop her from pulling the trigger and killing the smartest woman you ever knew -

“that’s not captain lovelace,” you say, calmly, and ready yourself to explain.

  
  


** _awake for ever in a sweet unrest-_ **

  
  


blood always seems that little bit brighter when it’s your own. screams certainly seem louder.

  
  


** _still, still to hear her tender-taken breath-_ **

  
  


oh, you never thought for a second that jacobi would ever be able to betray you, but here he is. he’s taken over the station, he’s got a  _ bomb _ , and he’s got minkowski to turn her gun on you again. you look at him over her shoulder, and there’s no reluctance in his eyes. he knows what he’s doing, and there’s a sinking feeling in your stomach as you realise just how much you’ve gone and underestimated him.

  
  


** _and so live ever-_ **

  
  


“-or else swoon to death,” cutter murmurs, his hands icy-cold where they rest on either side of your face, thumb tracing lightly over your cheekbone. you stare into his eyes, older than his face shows, and they’re cold, none of the friendliness his voice makes you envisage in them. he smiles at you, a feral grin that’s more of just a display of dominance, baring his teeth. behind you, out of sight, pryce huffs, typing something before she comes back into view, a mass of wires and metal in her hands before she lays it all out on her table.

“oh, warren,” cutter almost coos, as she sets herself up, “remember to hold still. if you do, you might only feel a teensy-tiny pinch! if not… it’ll hurt a  _ lot more _ .”   
  


“have you ever felt so alive?” you once asked jacobi in midwinter, blood staining the snow and your clothes, and he’d grinned up at you with his eyes bright with that spark, that flame in them you’d always loved seeing so much. you lean into the memory, cast your mind back to better days as pryce slowly gets to work.

“god, no,” you remember him saying with a grin, before the memory fades into whiteness, into fresh snow, and then all of a sudden you feel like you’re burning, all you know is the agony shooting through your body from your wrist.

you think you’re screaming, and you keep your eyes clamped shut and try to think of anything else, but your whole world is all-consuming, blinding pain.

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> you may well remember this from when i posted the original 2 years ago in 2017 but i feel like this rewrite showcases my skills a lot better. find me on tumblr @sciencematter


End file.
